English Reading Skill 2, Determine The Organization of Ideas [PDF]

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Skill 2



Determine The Organization Of Ideas



Determine the main idea of each paragraph. 



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If asked who invented the game of baseball, most Americans would probably reply that it was Abner Doubleday. At the beginning of this century, there was some disagreement over how the game of baseball had actually originated, so sporting-goods manufacturer Spaulding inaugurated a commission to research the question. In 1908 a report was published by the commission in which Abner Doubleday, a U.S. Army officer from Cooperstown, New York, was given a credit for the invention of the game. The National Baseball Hall of Fame was established in Cooperstown in honor of Doubleday. Today, most sports historians are in agreement that Doubleday really did not have much to do with the development of baseball. Instead, baseball seems to be a close relation to the English game of rounders and probably has English rather than American roots.



How is the information in the passage organized? 



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If asked who invented the game of baseball, most Americans would probably reply that it was Abner Doubleday. At the beginning of this century, there was some disagreement over how the game of baseball had actually originated, so sporting-goods manufacturer Spaulding inaugurated a commission to research the question. In 1908 a report was published by the commission in which Abner Doubleday, a U.S. Army officer from Cooperstown, New York, was given a credit for the invention of the game. The National Baseball Hall of Fame was established in Cooperstown in honor of Doubleday. Today, most sports historians are in agreement that Doubleday really did not have much to do with the development of baseball. Instead, baseball seems to be a close relation to the English game of rounders and probably has English rather than American roots.



Create a graphic organizer.



The second paragraph refutes the idea in the first paragraph



Determine the main ideas of each of the following paragraphs. 



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Conflict within an organization is not always viewed as undesirable. In fact, various managers have widely divergent ideas on the values that conflict can have. According to the traditional view of conflict, conflict is harmful to an organization. Managers with this traditional view of conflict see it as their role in an organization to rid the organization of any possible sources of conflict. The interactionist view of conflict, on the other hand, holds that conflict can serve an important function in an organization by reducing complacency among workers and causing positive changes to occur. Managers who hold an interactionist view may actually take steps to stimulate conflict within the organization.



How is the information in the following paragraph organized? 



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



Conflict within an organization is not always viewed as undesirable. In fact, various managers have widely divergent ideas on the values that conflict can have. According to the traditional view of conflict, conflict is harmful to an organization. Managers with this traditional view of conflict see it as their role in an organization to rid the organization of any possible sources of conflict. The interaction view of conflict, on the other hand, holds that conflict can serve an important function in an organization by reducing complacency among workers and causing positive changers to occur. Managers who hold an interactions view may actually take steps to stimulate conflict within the organization.



Create a graphic organizer based on the following passage. 



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



Conflict within an organization is not always viewed as undesirable. In fact, various managers have widely divergent ideas on the values that conflict can have. According to the traditional view of conflict, conflict is harmful to an organization. Managers with this traditional view of conflict see it as their role in an organization to rid the organization of any possible sources of conflict. The interaction view of conflict, on the other hand, holds that conflict can serve an important function in an organization by reducing complacency among workers and causing positive changers to occur. Managers who hold an interactions view may actually take steps to stimulate conflict within the organization.



Contrasting views of conflict are presented



Create a graphic organizer from the following paragraph and determine the organization of the paragraph. 



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IQ, or Intelligence Quotient, is defined as the ratio of a patron’s mental age to chronological age, with ratio multiplied by 100 to remove the decimal. Chronological age is easily determined; mental age is generally measured by some kind of standard test and is not so simple to define. In theory, a standardized IQ test is set up to measure an individual’s ability to perform intellectual operations such as reasoning and problem solving. These intellectual operations are considered to represent intelligence. In practice, it has been impossible to arrive at consensus as to which types of intellectual operations demonstrate intelligence. Furthermore, it has been impossible to devise a test without cultural bias, which is to say that any IQ tests so far proposed have been shown to reflect the culture of the test makers. Test takers from that culture would, it follows, score higher on such a test than test takers from a different culture with equal intelligence.



Create a graphic organizer from the following paragraph and determine the organization of the paragraph. 



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The largest lake in the western US is the Great Salt Lake, an inland saltwater lake in northwestern Utah, just outside the state of Salt Lake City. Rivers and streams feed into the Great Salt Lake, but none drain out of it; this has a major influence on both the salt content and the size of the lake. Although the Great Salt Lake is fed by freshwater streams, it is actually saltier than the oceans of the world. The salt comes from more than two million tons of minerals that flow into the lake each year from the rivers and creeks that feed it. Sodium and chloride-the components of salt- comprise the large majority of the lake’s mineral content. The Great Salt Lake can vary tremendously from its normal size of 1700 square miles, depending on long-term weather conditions. During periods of heavy rains, the size of the lake can swell tremendously from the huge amounts of water flowing into the lake from its feeder rivers and streams; in 1980 the lake even reached a size of 2400 square miles. During periods of dry weather, the size of the lake decreases, sometimes drastically, due to evaporation.



Create a graphic organizer from the following paragraph and determine the organization of the paragraph. 



Common types of calendars can be based on the Sun or on the Moon. The solar calendar is based on the solar year. Since the solar year is 365.2422 days long, solar calendars consist of regular years of 365 days and have an extra day every fourth year, or leap year, to make up for the additional fractional amount. In a solar calendar, the waxing and waning of the moon can take place at various stages of each month. The lunar calendar is synchronized to the lunar month rather than the sola year. Since the lunar month is twenty nine and a half days long; most lunar calendars have alternating months of twenty nine and thirty nine and a half days. A twelve month lunar year thus has 354 days, 11 days shorter than a solar year.



Create a graphic organizer from the following paragraph and determine the organization of the paragraph. 



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A hoax, unlike an honest error, is deliberately concoctedplan to present an untruth as the truth. It can take the form of a fraud, a fake, a swindle, or a forgery, and can be accomplished in almost any field: successful hoaxes have been foisted on the public in fields as varied as politics. Religion, science, art, and literature. A famous scientif hoax occurred in 1912 when Charles Dawson claimed to have uncovered a human skull and jawbone on the Piltdown Common in southern England. These human remains were said to be more than 500000 years old and were unlike any other remains from that period; as such they represented an important discovery in the study of human evolution. These remains, popularly known as the Piltdown man and scientifically named Eoanthropus dawsoni after their discoverer, confounded scientists for more than forty years. Finally in 1953, a chemical analysis was used to date the bones, and it was found that the bones were modern bones that had been skillfully aged. A further twist to the hoax was that the skull belonged to a human and the jaws to an orangutan.